I have to offer my congratulations this Sunday before Christmas to Crutchfield for successfully bridging the consumer electronics gender gap!

Crutchfield has always been a “home team favorite” for me, since I grew up in Virginia and was into Crutchfield’s original focus area of car audio since the Jensen Triax days.  But of course car audio, and much of home consumer electronics in general, have been in the male domain.  The last couple of decades in CE have been about cultivating the real buyer in the house (such as my wife).

For years now we’ve been talking about wife acceptance factor (WAF) or the more modern spouse acceptance factor (SAF?).  Home theater, with its family-friendly bent, and custom installed audio, have opened up huge opportunities for the mainstream domestication of consumer electronics.  iPods and docks have helped a lot, as well.

So, back to Crutchfield and why I am congratulating them.  Shortly before this year’s Thanksgiving and Black Friday brouhaha Crutchfield’s holiday catalog arrived at my family’s door.  Snail mail in our house tends to get divided into his and hers piles, where I get Car & Driver and the bills and my wife gets Vanity Fair and most of the catalogs, particularly at this holiday time of year.

The Crutchfield catalog was in the hers pile, which I assumed to be an accident, since I’ve been getting it for years.  I moved it to the his pile, and an hour later my wife said “why did you take my catalog?” referring to the Crutchfield catalog.  At that moment I knew that Crutchfield had succeeded!  My wife said “I saw some interesting things in there” and I know she wasn’t talking about gifts for me.  Crutchfield has made its offerings and appearance sufficiently enticing that my dear wife was hooked.

Congratulations to Crutchfield!

© Copyright 2013 Stephen Shenefield